In Ridley Scott’s 2015 sci-fi film, The Martian, botanist Mark Watney, who is trapped on the red planet, creates a garden using local soil and the crew’s bio-waste, as well as water from rocket fuel. While vegetable gardens on Mars are still a distant dream, building houses may not be a problem — should humans colonise the planet.
Researchers from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a way to make bricks from Martian soil with the help of bacteria and urea. These ‘space bricks’ can be used to construct building-like structures on Mars that could facilitate human settlement on the red planet, said IISc in a press release.
Their research was published in the peer-reviewed open access scientific journal, PLOSOne. The team first made the slurry by mixing Martian soil with guar gum, a bacterium called Sporosarcina pasteurii, urea and nickel chloride (NiCl 2). “This slurry can be poured into moulds of any desired shape, and over a few days the bacteria convert the urea into crystals of calcium carbonate. These crystals, along with biopolymers secreted by the microbes, act as cement holding the soil particles together,” stated the release.
